Telescopes

Gizmodo. These Tiny Antennas Will Help Map Big Bang's Afterglow
This is the Best Footage Yet of an Exoplanet Orbiting its Star. World's Largest Camera Will Show Us the Universe Like We've Never Seen It. Here's How Planet Hunters Are Going to Find the Next Earth. China and EU pore over proposals for joint space mission. China and Europe are collaborating to launch a low-cost space mission.

An array of satellites around the Moon is in the running to become the first mission in a collaboration between the European Union (EU) and China — a telescope to peer back to the Universe’s ‘Dark Ages’, the time before the first stars were formed. The proposed project, called Discovering the Sky at the Longest Wavelengths (DSL), is one of around 15 submitted for a call by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) that closed on 16 March. The final mission will be led by principal investigators affiliated with both European and Chinese institutions, with an aim to launch in 2021. This will not be the first mission that China and the EU have worked on together, says Luigi Colangeli, who heads the coordination office for ESA’s scientific programme. EU scientists contributed to the payload of China’s Double Star mission, which launched in 2003 to study the near-Earth environment.

Here's Why You Should Be Excited About The James Webb Space Telescope. How Astronomers Turned This White Dwarf Into A Magnifying Glass. The Earth's most powerful telescope goes online next week. The Moon is a particularly good place to do neutrino physics because of the the cosmic ray backgrounds underground.

On Earth, at sea level, cosmic rays are mostly due to high-energy protons interacting with the upper atmosphere. These collisions create a lot of pions. Because the atmosphere isn't very dense, these pions don't slow down very quickly, and so when they decay into muons the muons are still extremely energetic. Muons are highly penetrating particles, so even when we build neutrino detectors kilometres underground we have to deal with a very significant cosmic-ray muon background signal. On the Moon, with no atmosphere to speak of, the primary cosmic-ray protons smack into solid rock, so the pions are created in that very dense medium and almost all of them slow way down before decaying, so the muons only have the muons are much lower energy and penetrate a very short distance.
Hell Yes: NASA Aims to Revive Kepler Mission with Clever Plan. Here's the thing,if NASA had the kind of budget and attention it deserves then Kepler would get a repair mission.But NOOOOOO we don't dare spend some fractional percentage of what we throw away on crap like paying benefits to dead people.

But I will say that the situation does inspire genius and adaptation,making do with less,fixing what is thought to be unfixable.It well may be that this will translate into less costly and more functional efforts in space going forward. Still,it's short sighted to under fund major aspects of the future.Space will be more and more a part of our world plus space exploration is a major source of scientific invention and innovation,arguably even more important than space flight itself. Anyway I salute NASA for finding a way to make some use of something that likely would have just languished until burned up on reentry or floated away.
Fermi at Five Years.

The James Webb Space Telescope. About ALMA. The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a revolutionary instrument in its scientific concept, its engineering design, and its organization as a global scientific endeavor...

Currently under construction in the thin, dry air of northern Chile's Atacama desert at an altitude of 5,000 meters above sea level, ALMA will initially be composed of 66 high-precision antennas working together at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths, with a possible extension in the future. Thanks to its high resolution and sensitivity, ALMA will open an entirely new "window" on the Universe, allowing scientists to unravel longstanding and important astronomical mysteries, in search of our Cosmic Origins.

Some people say that the sun never sets on ALMA. Indeed, ALMA is a wonderful example of a worldwide collaboration , involving partners from four continents. ALMA is expected to begin science operations with a limited number of antennas and to start full science operations with 66 antennas.
NuSTAR - NEWS & UPDATES. Facebook. The Earth's most powerful telescope goes online next week. The James Webb Space Telescope. About Webb's Orbit The James Webb Space Telescope will observe primarily the infrared light from faint and very distant objects.

But all objects, including telescopes, also emit infrared light. To avoid swamping the very faint astronomical signals with radiation from the telescope, the telescope and its instruments must be very cold. Therefore, Webb has a large shield that blocks the light from the Sun, Earth, and Moon, which otherwise would heat up the telescope, and interfere with the observations. To have this work, Webb must be in an orbit where all three of these objects are in about the same direction. The L2 orbit is an elliptical orbit about the semi-stable second Lagrange point .